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Tsvangirai's family maintain sanctions on Elizabeth

The wife of ailing MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is still not allowed in the Donald Gordon Medical Centre premises as she is still under sanctions from seeing her husband where the 65-year-old opposition leader is receiving medical treatment.

Tsvangirai's family members are refusing to allow Tsvangirai's wife, Elizabeth, to see him at the top-notch 190-bed Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre - well-known as one of the best cancer treatment facilities in the southern region. Tsvangirai's brother vets everyone who want to visit the ailing MDC leader.

WDGMC is the same hospital that attended President Emmerson Mnangagwa after he was poisoned in Gwanda.

Close relatives of the MDC leader accuse Elizabeth of backing MDC vice president Nelson Chamisa to succeed Tsvangirai and fear she could put pressure on him to facilitate his ascendancy to the throne without following the party's constitution.

The former prime minister's wedding was dogged by court cases which denied him permission to marry the imposing widow, Macheka, now 41, in either a civil or traditional "customary" ceremony.

A customary ceremony went ahead regardless in front of hundreds of his supporters in the capital and was blessed by a Catholic priest.

A staffer at the enquiry desk at Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre Paediatric and Adult Oncology unit within the hospital declined to confirm or deny the sanctions, citing physician-patient privilege and patient confidentiality - which requires health care providers to keep a patient's personal health information private unless consent to release the information is provided by the patient.

A recorded conversation between the former union leader and medical staff, captures a briefing the MDC leader got about his relatives' rancourous behaviour at the hospital facility, and he was told that security have resolved to keep them out of the in-patients unit.

The staffer affirmed the primacy of the physician's responsibility toward the patient, and told the MDC leader, who was conversing in a weak voice that the best interest of the patient comes first.